The drone attack on a remote US base in Jordan that killed 3 Americans and wounded two dozen more has been linked to Iran, or more precisely to Iran-backed militias:
3 American Soldiers Killed in Drone Strike in Jordan, U.S. Says
“Three U.S. service members were killed — and many wounded — during an unmanned aerial drone attack on our forces stationed in northeast Jordan near the Syria border,” Mr. Biden said in a statement on Sunday. “While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”
This prompted immediate cries that Biden (a) has been incompetent in containing Iran and (b) has to do something about Iran.
Biden Vows to Retaliate After Strike Against American Forces in Jordan
Republicans wasted little time on Sunday blaming Mr. Biden for the deaths of the troops in Jordan , maintaining that his failure to take more devastating action in the past three months left Iran and its proxies confident that they could act with impunity.
This, of course, ignores the history of Trump’s failures that have led Iran to do exactly that:
As for Mr. Trump, now the front-runner for the Republican nomination to challenge Mr. Biden for his old job, he claimed on social media on Sunday that “this attack would NEVER have happened if I was president, not even a chance.” In fact, Iran and its proxies did attack American and allied interests during Mr. Trump’s presidency, and at one point Mr. Trump called off a retaliatory strike that he deemed excessive. He did later order a strike that killed a top Iranian general, but when Iran responded with missile strikes that injured but did not kill American troops, Mr. Trump ordered no further action. [emphases added]
This is exactly the kind of situation that calls for nuance, for careful weighing of blowback potential and overreaction, for calculating the impact — all things Biden is good at and Trump and the GOP are not.
U.S. weighs response to killing of its troops in tinderbox Middle East
As the United States mulls its response to a drone attack that killed three U.S. troops and injured at least 34, it treads a risky line, where any misstep could embroil Washington and its allies more deeply in a war with Iran and its proxies. . . .
Driving home the complexity of the multifront conflict, more cross-border strikes were reported in the region Monday morning: Iraqi militias claimed to have targeted Israel, while Iran and Syria accused Israel of striking in Damascus. The United States has already been drawn into military intervention, repeatedly bombing Iranian-linked Houthis in Yemen in response to their blocking of international shipping routes in what they say is retaliation against Israel.
Trump doesn’t want the GOP to come to any rational decision on the border problems, purely so he can campaign on Biden’s being unable to do so. Now he — and his GOP toadies such as Lindsay Graham — are jiggling Biden’s elbow in the clear hope that he will make a terrible situation that much worse, so that Trump can claim, once again, that only he can make it better. If that leads to a wider war, even to a global war, so much the better, as they see it.
I recall a definition of evil from one of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar novels that has stuck with me for many years now. In essence, she defines evil as an unquenchable desire for something that someone else has, so much so that it is willing to destroy that thing rather than let someone else have it. In this case, the “thing” is a stable world, and Trump and the GOP are willing to destroy it rather than let Biden take credit for maintaining it.
That is evil.